January is full of New Year’s resolutions aplenty, and getting healthy is one of the most popular choices.

As you look forward to a new you in 2017, we want you to step back in time and explore the recipes created by Vera Richter in the 1920s.

Vintage Vegan is guaranteed to give you some foodie inspiration that will take you out of your comfort zone. This raw vegan recipe book offers delicious and unique food and drink that is sure to kick-start your January. Whilst resolutions seems like a good idea when you make them, more often than not we all slip up soon enough. Instead of dreading your healthy eating, and daydreaming of chocolate at your desk, let Vintage Vegan take you on a journey to discover the extensive options available to you whilst on a vegan diet. Those January blues will cause no more trouble once you start a fulfilling and satisfying vegan lifestyle.

Here’s how Vintage Vegan can help you to achieve your goal:

If it’s the 3pm sugar slump you struggle with then Vera’s coconut caramels or peanut butter confections will do the trick.

Liven up your salads with the sesame seed dressing or simplicity dressing.

Buying an unhealthy lunch will be a thing of the past with Vera’s tomato-cream soup or summer salad.

Keep up the Christmas spirit with vegan mince pies and Christmas spice cake.

By using Vera’s recipes inside Vintage Vegan, your energy levels will be boosted after the comfort food of Christmas. An extra boost will help to combat your January blues and make your Monday mornings something to look forward to.

The nutritional benefits are abundant in the most popular recipes from the first raw vegan restaurant. And we want to share that goodness with you to help ensure your January is the best it can be.

Beating the January blues has never been easy, but sticking to your New Year’s resolution has never been simpler.

It’s always exciting to see hard work come together when we receive the finished copies of our books. One of the most recent to touch down in the Plexus office is Vintage Vegan, by Vera Richter, a title that I’ve been working on since starting here as an intern in March.

On the surface, it’s a raw food recipe book, but its significance goes much deeper. Vintage Vegan is a collection of recipes from the world’s first raw vegan restaurant, opened in California in 1917. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking that the raw food movement is an emergence of recent years, but Richter takes us to the roots of this long-standing dietary choice, showing us her early interpretation of raw veganism. In Richter’s time, California was a hub for individuals following raw food diets and embracing what were considered ‘alternative’ lifestyles. Her restaurant, The Eutropheon, became a place for influential figures in the alternative lifestyle movement to meet and exchange ideas.

Richter’s recipes return to the essentials of raw foodism. Fewer ingredients were available when Richter was writing these recipes, almost a century ago, but she manages to produce tasty and filling recipes that have stood the test of time to be as satisfying today as when they were first conceived. Most of the ingredients required can be found in any supermarket, so not only are her recipes are easy to execute, they are also very economical. This was no doubt an important consideration for Richter, as her cafeteria-style restaurant served hundreds at a time.

Months of proofreading and editing Vintage Vegan left me eager to try out some of Richter’s recipes for myself. I have chosen one that particularly appealed to me, a peanut butter confection (to be found on page 88). This recipe demonstrates the wonderful simplicity of Richter’s approach, requiring only two ingredients – dates and peanut butter.

I used the dates that were most readily available to me, Sayer dates, but I would recommended using a more meaty, juicy variety such as Medjool to make your treats feel even more indulgent. Peanut butter could be substituted for another nut butter, if desired.

The method was fairly simple, the dates had to be chopped in a food processor and then stirred into the peanut butter to combine, before rolling and shaping. Unfortunately I found myself lacking when rolling them into equal sized balls; although a straightforward task, my treats emerged rather non-uniform. I made a last-minute decision to coat them in ground almonds to add an extra dimension to the taste.

Although my substandard food prep skills leave these less aesthetically-pleasing than Richter no doubt intended, the finished result was delicious! 10 out of 10 for Vera Richter’s Peanut Butter Confection from the entire Plexus team, who sampled the fruits of my labour this morning.